The quality drove you away yet you only used it for 4 months? You barly have time to look arround much less wait to see how patching/upgrades and system stability progresses. If your system is not coherent and functional its your own fault, gentoo is a meta-distro you make it what you want/need, there is no fence. You either have a base install or you add to it. Don't blame the gentoo community because you used erroneous CFLAGS.
Debian? Gentoo's stable branch is stable. Debian's stable branch ought to be renamed ancient. Without proof I tend to think 99% of debian users run it "unstable", so "the results are unpredictable?" . The gentoo stable is due to user recomendations and developer testing not a developer thinking "It works on my box, fine lets release it to the world." I think the developers of individual packages are more qualified to answer when their program is stable or not, the gentoo community listens to those developers and its community. You are able to mask any package or version you consider unstable for your system. Summary, don't blame gentoo if your box isnt stable, it's your own damn fault for not knowing how to use portage to create a custom stable linux workstation or server.
P.S. uname -a
Linux hepheastus 2.6.0-test9 #2 Fri Nov 28 01:53:06 CST 2003 ppc 7455, altivec supported GNU/Linux